Increasingly consumers are conducting financial transactions and performing business accounting through consumer-operated devices, such as: Self-Service Terminals (SSTs) without the assistance of a clerk and mobile device owned/operated by the consumers.
For example, it is fairly common for a consumer to now use a mobile device, such as a phone to take a picture of a check and deposit that check with a bank using a mobile application. A variety of issues are usually encountered in this process.
However, this process will typically not work well with larger documents or financial instruments, such as invoices that can be 8½ by 11 inches. Additionally, larger documents typically require better image quality than do smaller documents, such as checks for purposes of performing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the documents. This means that larger documents require higher resolution images for OCR than what is conventionally used for check image capture in the industry.
However, even with traditional check image capture and processing applications, there are still issues that have yet to be overcome in the industry. For example, the consumer is usually required to manually align the check image in a screen of the mobile device and press a button to snap a picture of the check; the check image is then sent from the mobile application to the bank. This can create a variety of problems that prevents the bank from being able to process the check information from the consumer-captured image, such as: 1) a poor angle used by the consumer in taking the image, 2) the image does not include all edges of the check information resulting in some information being unavailable in the check image, 3) the lighting when the image was taken was of poor quality such that the check information cannot be processed, 4) the consumer's hand was shaking when the photo was taken for whatever reason (consumer traveling, etc.) resulting in a blurred check image.
Typically, the consumer is unaware of what the problem was and the bank just reports a non-meaningful error back to the consumer that the check cannot be deposited with the bank. The consumer may or may not try again; usually the consumer thinks that something is wrong with the check itself and may call the entity that provided the check or may personally visit a bank branch in an attempt to deposit the check. Any of these options are time consuming and are undesirable situations for both the consumer and the bank.
Additionally, with traditional mobile check capture the screen orientation is preset on the mobile device in landscape mode. For larger documents, this may not always be the proper orientation that would enable the user to take a larger sized image. Further, many times the user is not aware that changing the orientation would allow the user to move closer to the image and get a better quality image. Another issue is that the consumer's camera may be too close or too far from the check; if too close some areas of the check are missing in the captured image, and it too far the quality of the captured image may be inadequate for subsequent image processing.